She and husband Smith celebrated their first anniversary by collecting stones from the French Guiana penal colony, Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, in an effort to feel closer to Jean Genet, one of her most revered authors.

The Mapplethorpe Foundation is backing a biopic on the photographer’s life, and Pitchfork reports that film’s stars have been cast: Doctor Who’s Matt Smith will be playing Robert Mapplethorpe, and Zosia Mamet of Girls will be playing Patti Smith.

The last painting Frida painted in her life was watermelons, and at the end of his life, Diego also painted watermelons. I always thought that was beautiful: this green fruit that opens up, the pulp, the flesh, the blood, these black seeds.

What the book expresses supremely well is the tentativeness of every movement forward, the sense of following a path so risky, so sketchily perceptible, that at any moment one might go astray and never be heard from again, never perhaps even hear from the deepest part of oneself again.

Have you heard the good news? Singer-songwriter Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, about her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, is going to be made into a mini-series. The Guardian reported that Smith will co-write the show with John Logan (who created Penny Dreadful for Showtime).

In celebration of this era recently stirred up by the release of Montage of Heck, the Washington Post published an oral history of Lollapalooza’s most alternative of tours. In 1995, Lollapalooza’s founders took a break from booking platinum artists and experimented with featuring a lineup that matched the “indie” and “alternative” labels that are now so often thrown around indiscriminately.

Multi-talented artist and writer Patti Smith has influenced groups disparate as Sonic Youth, R.E.M., and Madonna. Her seminal 1975 album Horses helped to spur the early punk movement in New York City. Smith was an important member of the scene which spawned punk heroes The Ramones, Television, and The Sex Pistols.

If asked who reviewed Haruki Murakami’s new novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Patti Smith might not be your first guess. But review it she did—skillfully, favorably, and, to no surprise, colorfully.

“What matters is to know what you want and pursue it,” says Smith. She urges us to recognize that suffering is part of the package for everyone. “Life is going to be difficult.” Ride with it, she urges. Nothing is perfect.

“Herman Hesse’s typewriter, Bolaño’s chair, Smith’s father’s favourite cup, Virginia Woolf’s cane and bed. It is as if she were furnishing a home with these photographs for the ghosts of her favorite lives.”

After winning the National Book Award for her memoir, Just Kids, Patti Smith is venturing into new artistic territory. She is set to work with Tony award-winning playwright, John Logan, to adapt her memoir into a film. As per her successful accomplishments as a musician, writer and visual artist, her cinematic undertaking will most certainly be amazing.

I don't think of anyone specific while writing, and I don't want to get caught up in imagining what a reader might think because I do think that can get distracting. But I just think it has become clearer to me that writing is making a vessel to send to a reader. ...more

The week in New York Jonathan Ames has a Ball, Salman Rushdie reads, Paul Auster stays true to NYC, Ann Beattie compiles stories form The New Yorker, Patti Smith hosts a tribute for Jim Carroll, feel Refreshx3 at Happy Ending, John Baldessari holds this title of week’s MOVIE PICK, (Le) Poisson Rouge Gleeks out, and New Photography 2010 in ART.

This week in New York the sixth annual PEN World Voices Festival(PWVF) opens its week-long celebration of international writing with such notable literary figures as Sherman Alexie, Claire Messud, Yiyun Li, Salman Rushdie and Lewis Lapham among others (Full Schedule Here), Agriculture Reader holds a launch party, the Dead or Alive exhibition opens at the Museum of Arts and Design, Gossip perform, Stephen Colbert helps celebrate the 50th anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird and the Tribeca Film Festival(TFF) continues.

I finished reading Just Kidsby Patti Smith at Four Barrel on Valencia Street in San Francisco and although I tried my hardest to blink them back, tears kept falling out of the corners of my eyes onto my cheeks and dotting the raw wood table and then I was overwhelmed with sadness enough that I pounded the rest of my coffee in one gulp and actually went outside to walk around for a few minutes to clear the awe and despair from my mind.

Patti Smith’s memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe chronicles two “mutinous spirits” in the chaos of 1970s New York.

This week in New York, the Rumpus and HTMLGIANT present ONE YEAR LATER a multimedia event with an allstar lineup of readers and musicians including Rivka Galchen, Tao Lin, Jeffrey Lewis and more in celebration of the Rumpus’s First Anniversary, the Frederick Wiseman retrospective begins at MOMA, the Rumpus’s own Stephen Elliott gives talk “On Creating the Adderall Diaries,”Obediance–a film documenting the infamous “Milgram experiments,” screens, Patti Smith and Sam Shepard reunite to read at 92Y, and Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge opens.

Events include readings and musical performances in support of her book and a new PBS documentary, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, about her life and art, which has already screened at over 30 film festivals around the world including the 2008 Sundance Film Festival where it won an award for cinematography.

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